Ray Leight Works Cheerfully Excessive Gallery Review

November 07, 1985|by JANE MAULFAIR, The Morning Call

The November exhibit at the Jack Savitt Gallery in Macungiefeatures the works of Ray Leight, the Lansdale artist whose zany sculptures, novel stack- toys and witty constructions have delighted gallery audiences young and old.

Leight's works at the Savitt are cheerfully excessive. Every possible inch of exhibition space simply spills over with the "Leight touch." Whimsical characters dance (or fly) over surfaces of paintings; imaginative figures in three dimensions stand two, three, four abreast, and curious little configurations derived from found forms are mounted on the mantle and in window sills. Imagine a Victorian bathtub's claw feet presented upside down to cradle brightly painted spheres.

All of Leight's works in the show are recent. And while the majority of pieces bear the familiar color and illustrative brush stroke that the artist produces in such abundance, some works show evidence of a shift, not so much in style as in treatment of subject. Introducing still-life paintings which are anything but run-of-the-mill, Leight, in one work, presents a conventional, respectable tall pitcher in the vicinity of fruit and bread. But even in the still life, Leight is unable to resist animating his objects. The bread is more like a zoomorphic creature, and the fruit displays a face and a personality. Buzzing around the objects in the still life are loveable, feathered creatures, some in low relief.

New to Leight's repertoire of colorful figures are a group of black and white abstract images mounted double in one frame. Resembling calligraphic emblems, the black and white works are immediately provocative, and demonstrate Leight's willingness to vary the format.

In the upstairs galleries at the Savitt are paintings and sculptures from the collection and works by the featured sculptor for November, Klaus Ihlenfeld, metal sculptor from Bart. Ihlenfeld's works in this exhibition include small-scale welded landscapes and tree forms in bronze and copper. "Observatory," an intricate construction of skeletal cube forms, is well placed in a window sill and rather airy and pleasing as it catches the natural light.

On a more substantial level, but still small-scale, Ihlenfeld's "Magician and Two Moons" is a welded steel construction that resembles some Oceanic mythic figure. There is an attractive paradox in "Magician" in that the thick disc of a wafer of steel, the stoutest of material, suggests a subtle sag here and there, as if the steel is in a near-melting state.

The exhibition continues at the Savitt, 2015 Route 100, Macungie through November. Gallery hours are 4-8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, 1-6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For more information, call 398-0075.

Jane Maulfair is a free-lance writer on the visual arts for The Morning Call.